5 Colossal Events That Changed China Forever

As Shakespeare reminds us, “ what’s past is prologue .” This is especially the case with China, a nation with a continuous written history spanning three millennia. In particular, knowledge of five major historical events is essential to fully understanding contemporary Chinese politics and foreign policy.

Reign of the Kangxi Emperor (1661-1722)

What was it? The last Chinese dynasty was the Qing (1644-1911), and it reached its peak under the Kangxi Emperor. Kangxi’s reign was a time of efflorescence in literature and the arts, but also a period of aggressive military expansion. The territory effectively controlled by China has varied greatly over time . Many regions that are now part of the People’s Republic have not traditionally been under Chinese control, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and inner Mongolia. Indeed, some of the peoples of these areas dominated the Chinese. However, by the end of Kangxi’s reign, China had conquered all these provinces and more.

Why does it matter now? As Harold M. Tanner points out in his excellent China: A History , the West typically understands the changes China has undergone since the death of Mao Zedong (1976) as a matter of “opening” itself up after a period of “self-imposed isolation.” In contrast, the Chinese narrative is one of “a recovery of lost glory.” The image of that glory is the reign of Kangxi, in which China was the undisputed economic, military, and cultural power of Asia. And although the borders of Kangxi’s China are uncharacteristic of most of Chinese history, they typically coincide with China’s view of what “belongs” to it. Thus, Taiwan, which has not been governed by the People’s Republic since 1949, and had no substantial Chinese presence prior to the 17th century, is considered worth going to war over . And, as I always remind my draft-age students, the United States has a defense treaty with Taiwan, which would obligate us to defend them in the event of an attack from the mainland .

Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860)

What was it? By the early nineteenth century, Britain was spending large amounts of silver to buy Chinese silks, porcelain products, and especially tea. The English “tea” comes from tê, the word for tea in the dialect of Fujian, from which the British exported their products. However, China didn’t need anything Britain was selling, thereby creating a serious trade imbalance. Ingenious British merchants facilitated the recreational use of opium, which they grew in British-controlled India and then sold in China. The Hongkong-Shanghai Banking Corporation, now known as HSBC, was founded to meet the needs of British merchants in China . This solved Britain’s trade problem, but created an addiction crisis in China. When China tried to enforce its laws against opium importation, Britain responded by waging war in the name of “free trade.” The technologically superior British military crushed the Chinese. As a result of the Opium Wars, China was, in the blunt words of one Western diplomat, “carved up like a melon” into “spheres of influence.” The United Kingdom and other European powers forced China to accept treaties that essentially allowed them to govern parts of China’s own territory. It was also during this period that Hong Kong was “leased” to Britain.

What was it? The loss of the First Opium War helped fuel the Taiping Rebellion. The Taiping were a group of unorthodox Chinese Christians led by a man who claimed to be Jesus’ younger brother. Seeking to establish a utopian heavenly kingdom on earth, millions of fanatical Taiping staged an anti-government rebellion. The rebellion was eventually put down, but not until twenty million Chinese had died on both sides, due not only to combat, but to the starvation, illness and crime associated with the conflict. To put this in perspective, the current population of the state of New York is also about twenty million.

By the turn of the century, Japan had a modern army and navy, which allowed it to easily defeat China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). As a result of this conflict, Taiwan was ceded to Japan. Japan later won the respect of Western powers with its victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), which gave it control of Manchuria. At the end of World War I, as a reward for fighting on the Allied side, Japan was given the special economic and political privileges in Shandong province that Germany had previously enjoyed. China, which had fought on the Allied side with the promise that the German privileges would be completely revoked (not just given to someone else), was understandably outraged . Japan eventually provoked all-out war with China in 1937, in what was effectively the beginning of World War II. Historically, an unintended consequence of the war was to guarantee the victory of the Communists. The Communists had been almost annihilated by the pro-Western Nationalists prior to the start of World War II, but they were able to regroup while the Nationalists bore the brunt of the fighting against the Japanese. When the Japanese surrendered, the Communists overran the decimated and exhausted Nationalist forces.